Real-life 'Lion Kings': African big cats caught on film

By Tim Hume for CNN

Updated 1036 GMT (1836 HKT) April 30, 2012

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – A lion faces off with a crocodile. An apex predator, lions eat a broad range of hoofed mammals, including zebras, antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest, warthogs, giraffes and buffalo -- even rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and elephants on occasion. They also eat smaller animals, often scavenging their food from cheetahs or wild dogs.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – Cheetahs rest in the shade of a tree in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve. The reserve is named after the Maasai, the traditional inhabitants of the region, and the word "mara" -- which means "spotted" in the Maasai's language, and is the word they used to describe the landscape, with its patches of trees and scrub.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – The lion's roar can be heard up to 5 miles away, and is used to mark out territory, scare off rivals and strengthen group bonds.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – A pride of lions on the move. Food is shared out hierarchically within the pride, with adult males eating first, females second and the cubs taking the leftovers. Males are typically only able to maintain their dominance over a pride for two to three years, before being replaced by a rival.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – Lions can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour and leap 36 feet. But males have much shorter lives than their female counterparts, living up to 12 years in the wild compared with 18 years for lionesses.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – A lion cub. Young lions remain dependent on their mothers for two years, after which males may be ousted from the pride. While lions are apex predators in their environment, cubs are vulnerable to attack by hyenas and leopards.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – A trio of grown cheetahs. Cheetahs regularly lose their kills to lions and hyenas, and eat very quickly to try to avoid this, consuming up to 30 pounds of meat in a single sitting. Once they have eaten, they can survive for up to five days without more food.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – One of the lionesses tracked by the filmmakers during production. Highly social animals, lions live in prides that can include from one to three male lions and from three to 30 females, as well as their young. Lionesses are responsible for the majority of kills to feed the group.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – Sita, the adult female cheetah who is one of the "stars" of African Cats. Cheetahs are the fastest land animals in the world, with a top speed of 64 miles per hour. "Every day is a matter of life or death for the animals in our film," says director Keith Scholey. "There are incredible odds stacked against them... Yet in the face of those odds, you see huge acts of courage, incredible resilience and this great will to survive."

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – Cheetahs gather by the river in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in southwest Kenya. The reserve is famous as one of the few remaining places in Africa where the three big African cats -- lions, cheetahs and leopards -- live in large numbers and in close proximity. While cheetahs are often confused with leopards, but can be easily distinguished -- cheetahs have true spots while leopards have rosettes.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – Two lionesses at rest. Researchers say that evidence suggests female lions prefer to mate with partners with black manes.

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Photos:Up close with Kenya's great cats

Up close with Kenya's great cats – A lioness rests in a tree. Each has a distinctive combination of whisker spots that can be used to identify individual members of a pride.

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Story highlights

"African Cats" is a new film documenting the lives of Kenya's lions and cheetahs

The filmmakers spent more than two years following the great cats as they struggled to survive

During the course of filming, they got to know the distinct personalities of their subjects

They hope the film, billed as a "real-life Lion King," will spur audiences' interest in conservation

Filmmaker Keith Scholey has a PhD in zoology and three decades of experience filming and photographing wildlife. Yet when it came to predicting the behavior of the lions and cheetahs of Kenya's Maasai Mara Nature Reserve, all that proved of little use.

"You're constantly surprised," he said. "When you start following wild animals, you're initially an incredible expert. And the more you follow them, you realize you're less and less of an expert."

For his new film "African Cats," Scholey led a film crew documenting the lives of individual lions and cheetahs over the course of two and a half years. "The only thing we had control over was the selection of the characters -- we had no control over the plot," says Scholey.

The Disneynature film, which is narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart, debuted in the UK Wednesday, with a royal premiere attended by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The Duke gave a speech calling for an end to wildlife poaching in Africa after the screening.

Describing their filming routine, Scholey said each morning, the crew would wake in their camp before dawn, and set out to where they had left the cats the night before.

If they managed to find them, the crew would then follow their adventures through the 1510-square-kilometer reserve, one of the few remaining places where the three big African cats -- lions, cheetahs and leopards -- live in large numbers and in close proximity.

It led them to unforgettable sights -- all captured in high definition and slow motion -- as the animals engaged in rivalries and constant struggles for sustenance and survival, earning the movie a billing as the "real-life 'Lion King'."

"The most remarkable scene was two lions swimming across the flooded Mara River and one being taken by a croc and getting away," recalled Scholey. "We didn't know crocs would go for lions -- and now we know. You can see why lions are really unhappy to go in that river."

As the crew followed their subjects, the animals' individual personalities gradually revealed themselves.

"You don't want to anthropomorphize, yet they do have distinct personalities that come out," said Sophie Darlington, the movie's principal photographer. Some were brave, others cowards. Some were leaders, others followers. And some had developed specialist skills -- like the lioness who had mastered a unique technique for suffocating her prey -- that others lacked.

As a species, lions also had their own particular character -- dramatic, charismatic, and occasionally unintentionally comic -- which the crew grew to appreciate.

Keith Scholey, the director of "African Cats"

"There's nothing funnier than a lion doing a pratfall," said Darlington.

Explained specialist photographer Simon King: "It's their -- sometimes false -- sense of confidence, in everything. They don't think they can put a foot wrong and they frequently do, and it's amusing to watch."

The crew were safe observing the animals -- sometimes at extremely close quarters -- from the sanctuary of their vehicles, although lions and elephants sometimes wandered through their camps at night. On one occasion, a bull elephant, drawn to a fruiting tree, rolled over one of the crew's vehicles that had been parked nearby.

Generally though, their presence did not bother the animals, who were used to vehicles entering the reserve.

"Do they care? Some of the time we're undoubtedly an asset, because we're shade on a hot day," said King. "In the past I've had 13 lions under my car. They're very flatulent, and then they try to bite the brake tubes."

The film's producers hope that by engaging audiences in the real-life narratives of the great cats, they can encourage people to protect the species. Cheetahs, the world's fastest land animals, are endangered, while lions are classified as vulnerable.

"It's important not to convey a finger wagging message in every single production because that would be counterproductive," said King. "A movie like this is a celebration of other lives that I hope will get people thinking, so when they next hear that tigers, lions, cheetahs, elephants, rhino are under threat, they do something about it."